The prevelance of computers are inherently linked with the corporate desire to minimize cost and maximize productivity and profit. The origin of computers comes from military use; first seen in WW2 to calculate angles for artillery use and crack codes as with Enigma. Later, financial and educational institutions saw an ability to reduce labor cost by using computers to automate some record keeping. Why would they be interested in reducing cost? Capitalism, of course! And who were the ones programming these machines? Mostly, wealthy white men. You see, because computers were still giant, expensive machines, they required a college education to learn to use them. At this point, this was the 50s/60s, and non-white people had very little wealth due to, yknow, all that discrimination stuff. Plus, wealthy people especially back then were also very misogynistic (“i hate my wife” jokes, anyone?) And these wealthy whites were sometimes passionate for the industry, and as computers miniturized, they brought these minicomputers home, where they could use them for much more casual use. Enter the 70s, and these computer users start to make video games. Companies for this new fad start to show up. Fast forward a decade and people start making these new home computers play recorded audio and videos too, and before long, the baby dances. But not everyone had the money for home computers in the 90s, so not everyone is aware of the baby - which is where the discrimination part plays in. Most of the people who experienced the dancing baby in its prime were wealthy, majority white families, so the experience was unfortunately not universal. Or fortunately, idk lmao
Of course I’m stretching super hard, but politics are everywhere when you look into it.
Sometimes humans do stuff that are not at all related with politics. But we are masters of linking any non-political action to political arguments. (The classic ‘I like pancakes.’-‘So you hate waffles!’-problem)
Sometimes I just want to have a space to engage with funny memes without the mental strain of filtering out political comments.
I would say pre 2016 political jokes was at one level, where the onion could make jokes that was not just an echo of reality.
Somewhere after that we crossed the political joke event horizon, and now we live in bizarro world, where many news items could have been the onion jokes.
Sure that’s true, but here it’s like way above 50% of the posts being just full-on propaganda, disguised as memes. IDK, I’m just comparing it to other sites/communities where the politics to meme ratio is way lower and feels less forced.
I think the fediverse in general attracts a lot of people who are tired of capitalist assholes extracting wealth on various tech platforms, which probably explains some of it. People are very angry right now, and that’s gonna be hard to escape on Lemmy/kbin
Point me to a time/place when politics were not completely intertwined with meme communities.
Oh, right. That doesn’t actually exist.
One time, back in the 90s, a baby danced.
The prevelance of computers are inherently linked with the corporate desire to minimize cost and maximize productivity and profit. The origin of computers comes from military use; first seen in WW2 to calculate angles for artillery use and crack codes as with Enigma. Later, financial and educational institutions saw an ability to reduce labor cost by using computers to automate some record keeping. Why would they be interested in reducing cost? Capitalism, of course! And who were the ones programming these machines? Mostly, wealthy white men. You see, because computers were still giant, expensive machines, they required a college education to learn to use them. At this point, this was the 50s/60s, and non-white people had very little wealth due to, yknow, all that discrimination stuff. Plus, wealthy people especially back then were also very misogynistic (“i hate my wife” jokes, anyone?) And these wealthy whites were sometimes passionate for the industry, and as computers miniturized, they brought these minicomputers home, where they could use them for much more casual use. Enter the 70s, and these computer users start to make video games. Companies for this new fad start to show up. Fast forward a decade and people start making these new home computers play recorded audio and videos too, and before long, the baby dances. But not everyone had the money for home computers in the 90s, so not everyone is aware of the baby - which is where the discrimination part plays in. Most of the people who experienced the dancing baby in its prime were wealthy, majority white families, so the experience was unfortunately not universal. Or fortunately, idk lmao
Of course I’m stretching super hard, but politics are everywhere when you look into it.
Apologies for the sin of linking Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/
Sometimes humans do stuff that are not at all related with politics. But we are masters of linking any non-political action to political arguments. (The classic ‘I like pancakes.’-‘So you hate waffles!’-problem)
Sometimes I just want to have a space to engage with funny memes without the mental strain of filtering out political comments.
I would say pre 2016 political jokes was at one level, where the onion could make jokes that was not just an echo of reality.
Somewhere after that we crossed the political joke event horizon, and now we live in bizarro world, where many news items could have been the onion jokes.
Sure that’s true, but here it’s like way above 50% of the posts being just full-on propaganda, disguised as memes. IDK, I’m just comparing it to other sites/communities where the politics to meme ratio is way lower and feels less forced.
OK, fair enough.
I think the fediverse in general attracts a lot of people who are tired of capitalist assholes extracting wealth on various tech platforms, which probably explains some of it. People are very angry right now, and that’s gonna be hard to escape on Lemmy/kbin
Back in the 2000s, most memes were just cat pictures. Longcat [is long], ceiling cat [is watching you], keyboard cat, grumpy cat etc.
Also #BrusselsLockdown hashtag was used in 2015 to ease political tension.